"Gaudy Night" By Dorothy L Sayers

 The eleventh Lord Peter Wimsey whodunnit principally starring Harriet Vane, whodunnit author and Lord Peter's lover interest. Harriet goes back to her Oxford College who are experiencing an outbreak of poison pen letters and vandalism. Can Harriet track down the culprit before something serious happens?

The Crime Writers' Association ranked it 4th in their top 100 best crime novels of all time; the Mystery Writers of America ranked it 18th in their equivalent list. It clearly influenced Laurels Are Poison by Gladys Mitchell and other show its influence.

It is very much of its time. The women's college is a claustrophobic place where a Senior Common Room of the stuffy Misses endlessly debate whether a woman should be a wife and mother or an academic virgin. The pre-war rules by which they govern the students reflect old-fashioned sexist and puritanical mores. One must wear gowns to Hall and never ever ever bring a man into the college. A period piece.

Meanwhile the male undergraduates are represented as a set of irresponsible fools intent on climbing trees for wagers and driving fast cars and drinking expensive vintages. But, being almost exclusively upper class, they are good sorts.

This is by no means your average crime novel. It's much more than that. It is told in the past tense and the third person but from the exclusive point of view of protagonist-narrator Harriet Vane, an alumnus of the Oxford College, who combines a formidable academic intellect with a knowledge of the non-academic world contingent upon writing crime novels for a living and being involved in a scandal involving having a pre-marital relationship and being tried for murder. As well as exploring the relationships between the college fellows (who are mostly unmarried women) and developing a large number of characters, the book chronicles Harriet's uncertainty as to whether she should respond positively to a proposal of marriage from Lord Peter Wimsey: does she love him? could she live with him? She's also trying to write another novel and we learn about the difficulties facing her in its construction. She's also tempted by the lure of retreating from the world and re-immersing herself in academic life, tempted by withdrawal to the cloister. 

It is as well a celebration of the author's own learning. It positively teems with learned references. It so needs footnotes! Particularly to the quotations in Latin (and even one in Greek). Here are some I spotted: 

• “If only one could come back to this quiet place, where only intellectual achievement counted ... But she doubted whether she were now capable of any such withdrawal. ... No one can bathe in the same river twice, not even in the Isis.” (Ch 1) which references the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus.
• “Magnificent thought Harriet, but it is not war.” (Ch 2) which references the comment supposedly made about the gallantry shown by the soldiers in the Charge of the Light Brigade by French general Pierre Bosquet: 'C'est magnifique mais ce n'est pas la guerre'.
• “Like that thing that keeps cropping up in the new kind of physics ... Planck’s constant, or whatever they call it.” (Ch 2) referencing quantum physics, very new at the time.
• “I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done.” (Ch 4) which alludes to the phrase "we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done" which is part of the General Confession in the Book of Common Prayer for the Church or England.
• “I shall consider nothing but the value of the Thing-in-Itself, unmoved by any pressure of public opinion.” (Ch 8) which references a concept found in Kantian philosophy, the 'Ding an sich'.
• “We will continue to rob Peter to pay all.” (Ch 10) comes from a proverb: 'to rob Peter to pay Paul'.
• “The architecture of my own ancient foundation is mathematically compounded of ambition, distraction, uglification and derision.” (Ch 17) alludes to Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll in which the Mock Turtle describes the operations of arithmetic (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division).
• “One damn gin after another.” (Ch 19) refers to the folk saying, popular after 1909, that 'life is just one damned thing after another'.
• It also mentions a number of novels including The Search by C P Snow (which plays a part in the plot) and those by Galsworthy (three times; he had one the Nobel Prize in Literature three years before the book was set), and quotes from The Daniel Jazz.

And yet it is still a crime novel and the pieces of the jigsaw are elegantly inserted. They're easy to spot if you already know whodunnit and since this was my third reading of this novel I took pleasure in spotting how subtly the clues were given. 

It's not surprising, given how much is in this novel, that it is so long. If you're looking for a pure crime puzzle, seek elsewhere. But, despite its length, I thought Sayers kept up the pace brilliantly well, using the device of Lord Peter's unavailability to ratchet up the tension in the middle of the novel, when we come unbearably close to a murder and even the weather, hot and sultry before a thunderstorm - prefect pathetic fallacy! - gives Harriet a headache. There's even the delightful humour if undergraduates Mr Pomfret and Lord Peter's nephew Saint-George. And a couple of pages which are interior monologue if not stream of consciousness!

A delightful book.

Selected quotes:

• “As she beat the loose fluff from it, a tortoise-shell butterfly, disturbed from its hibernation beneath the flap of the trunk-lid, fluttered out into the brightness of the window, where it was caught and held by a cobweb.” (Ch 1)
• "As one grew older, as one established one’s self, one gained a new delight in formality." (C 1)
• "The mouth was the mouth of one who has been generous and repented of generosity; its wide corners were tucked back to give nothing away." (C 1)
• "As any student of literature must, she knew all the sins of the world by name, but it was doubtful whether she recognised them when she met them in real life." (C 1)
• "It was as though a misdemeanour committed by a person she knew was disarmed and disinfected by the contact." (C 1)
• "The fact that one had loved and sinned and suffered and escaped death was of far less ultimate moment than a single footnote in a dim academic journal establishing the priority of a manuscript or restoring a lost iota subscript." (C 1)
• “Of a scrupulous personal integrity, she embraced the irregularities of other people in a wide, unquestioning charity.” (Ch 1)
• “She looked as though the word ‘compromise’ had been omitted from her vocabulary.” (Ch 1)
• "It’s a matter of a + b, you know. Only there happened to be an unknown factor.’ ‘Like that thing that keeps cropping up in the new kind of physics,’ said the Dean. ‘Planck’s constant, or whatever they call it.’" (C 2)
• "there is no chance assembly of people who cannot make lively conversation about drains" (C 2)
• "Authority as such commands very little respect nowadays, and I expect that is a good thing on the whole, though it makes the work of running any kind of institution more difficult." (C 3)
• "A plough share is a nobler object than a razor. But if your natural talent is for barbering, wouldn’t it be better to be a barber, and a good barber – and use the profits (if you like) to speed the plough?" (C 3)
• "If you’d spent your time washing and cooking for a family and digging potatoes and feeding cattle, you’d know that that kind of thing takes the edge off the razor." (C 3)
• “She parted eventually from Mrs Bendick with a depressed feeling that she had seen a Derby winner making shift with a coal-cart.” (Ch 3)
• “Being a great father is either a very difficult or a very sadly unrewarded profession. Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or great wife standing behind him - or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and husbands behind them.” (Ch 3)
• "Haunts of ancient peace were all very well, but very odd things could crawl and creep beneath lichen-covered stones." (C 3)
• "one of the innumerable women with ‘school-teacher’ stamped on their resolutely cheery countenances" (C 3)
• "She had begun to take Wimsey for granted, as one might take dynamite for granted in a munitions factory" (C 4)
• "It’s surprisin’ how few people ever mean anything definite from one year’s end to the other." (C 4)
• “Some people's blameless lives are to blame for a good deal.” (Ch 5)
• “The Dean hovered about the Chancellor like a hen with one chick.” (Ch 6)
• “She did not care much about children; but one can scarcity say so, bluntly, to those possessed of those blessings.” (Ch 6)
• “The general impression of an Angora rabbit that had gone on the loose and was astonished at the result.” (Ch 8)
• “He had the appeal of a very young dog a very large breed - a kind of amiable absurdity.” (Ch 8)
• “When you get the thing dead right and you know it's dead right, there's no excitement like it. It's marvellous. It makes you feel like God on the Seventh Day - for a bit, anyhow.” (Ch 9)
• “If there's any subject in which you're content with the second-rate, then it isn't really your subject.” (Ch 9)
• "when men put their public lives before their private lives, it causes less outcry than when a woman does the same thing, because women put up with neglect better than men, having been brought up to expect it." (C 9)
• “Between Harriet and Mr Pomfret there occurred one of those silences in which the first word spoken forms like the stroke of the Gong.” (Ch 12)
• “However loudly we may assert our own unworthiness, few of us are really offended by hearing the assertion contradicted by a disinterested party.” (Ch 12)
• “The cultivated normality till it stood out of them all over in knobs, like the muscles upon professional strong men, and scarcely looked normal at all.” (Ch 13)
• "She resented the way in which he walked in and out of her mind as if it was his own flat." (C 14)
• “It was a neat and noiseless kind of sleep; the posture might be described as the half-hedgehog.” (Ch 15)
• “Lord, teach us to take our hearts and look them in the face however difficult it may be.” (Ch 15)
• "he was ready for mischief as a wilderness of monkeys." (C 17)
• "there is only one kind of wisdom that has any social value, and that is the knowledge of one’s own limitations." (C 17)
• "principles have become more dangerous than passions. It’s getting uncommonly easy to kill people in large numbers, and the first thing a principle does – if it really is a principle – is to kill somebody." (C 17)
• "The Universities are always being urged to march in the van of progress. But epic actions are all fought by the rearguard – at Roncevaux and Thermopylæ." (C 17)
• “A bad picture by a good painter is a betrayal of truth - his own truth.” (Ch 17)
• “What does it matter if it hurts like hell, so long as it makes a good book?” (Ch 18)
• "What is the use of making mistakes if you don’t make use of them?" (C 18)
• "Heroics that don’t come off are the very essence of burlesque." (C 18)
• "as understandable and pleasant as daily bread." (C 23)
• “Curious ... this desire to possess children and dictate their tastes, as though they were escaping fragments of one's self, and not separate individuals.” (Ch 21)

I first read this book decades ago when I was young and then during the Covid lock-down in December 2020 when I wrote this blog post. I amended it following my third reading in August 2026; 538 pages

First published by Victor Gollancz in 1935

My New English Library paperback was issued by Hodder and Stoughton in 2003

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

I have set myself the task of reading all the Lord Peter Wimsey novels (mostly again) in order. The ones I have read and reviewed in this blog so far include:

• Whose Body in which my Lord and his manservant, Bunter, are introduced
• Clouds of Witness in which Lord Peter must sleuth to get his brother Gerald, Duke of Denver, off a murder charge; Bunter assists; policeman Parker falls in love with Peter's sister Mary
• Unnatural Death which introduces another Wimsey sidekick: Miss Climpson; Bunter is involved
• The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club; Bunter is involved as is Miss Climpson
• Strong Poison which introduces Harriet Vane, a detective writer who becomes Lord Peter's love interest; Bunter realises Lord Peter's affection first
• The Five Red Herrings; Lord Peter in Scotland; Bunter in the background
• Have His Carcase: Harriet and Peter investigate the death of a gigolo with dreams; Bunter has a small supporting role
• Murder Must Advertise: Peter goes undercover at an advertising agency; Bunter plays a very small role; policeman Parker has married Mary and they have sons
• The Nine Tailors: Peter investigates the discovery of a body in someone else's grave in a small fenland village. Floods and campanology.
• Busman's Honeymoon: Peter and Harriet holiday together with Bunter but the self-catering cottage includes a corpse

There are also Wimsey books written since the death of DLS by Jill Paton Walsh. These include:

• The Attenbury Diamonds in which Lord Peter, in 1951, recalls the circumstances of his first case, the Attenbury Diamonds, which have gone missing again.
• The Late Scholar: in which Wimsey returns to Oxford